RACE WITH DEATH

Auckland Star, Volume LXXV, Issue 215, 11 September 1944, Page 3

RACE WITH DEATH

BOY'S LIFE SAVED

DRAMATIC DASH TO HOSPITAL

(0.C.) SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 25. Speed, speed and speed. . . A little 35-year-old boy named Jimmy looking with frightened blue eyes around the oxygen mask over his face. ... A perspiring pilot, grimly pushing his big transport plane through the air. . . . An ambulance screaming through the heart of Hollywood. . . . Doctors ready. . . . A rush to the surgery. Such was a dramatic race against death that was won. And all because of a chocolate-coated peanut. At 1.30 p.m. in the town of Henderson, just outside Boulder City, in the State of Nevada, a peanut became lodged in the trachea (windpipe) of little Jimmy Crowell. The hospital there did not have instruments to extract it. Dr. Donald McCormack and Jimmy's father, J. M. Crowell, hurried the boy to the airport. ' There was a fully loaded air liner leaving for Los Angeles. Three passengers got off. Jimmy, his father,' Dr. McCormack—and an oxygen tank—got on. Pilot Rudy Truesdale gave the big ship the gun. Regular flying time between Boulder City to the Lockheed Air Terminal in Burbank, California, is one hour and 40 minutes. Truesdale made it in one hour and 22 minutes. It was 3.52 p.m. when Truesdale rolled the big plane past the regular landing <spot to the T.W.A. hangar at the end of the runway, where an ambulance was waiting. Then the desperate race to the Children's Hospital in Hollywood commenced. A rush down the hall to the surgery, with Dr. McCormack saying, "He is getting bluer." It was 4.15 p.m. then. A silent wait, a shirt-sleeved father whose voice broke frequently with strain and emotion. And then: "It's out. He's doing fine, now." It was 5.5 p.m. then.